Kangxi Emperor (1661-1722): China's Longest-Reigning Ruler

The Kangxi Emperor ruled China from 1661 to 1722, the longest reign of any Chinese emperor. Coming to the throne as a child less than twenty years after the Manchu Qing dynasty seized Beijing, he crushed the last great rebellions, annexed Taiwan, settled the frontier with Russia and drove back the Dzungar Mongols. A capable soldier, a tireless administrator and a patron of learning who studied Western mathematics with Jesuit missionaries, he turned the conquest dynasty into a stable empire that would last until 1912.

Background: a young dynasty

The Qing dynasty had its roots in the Manchu state built by Nurhaci and Hong Taiji in north-east Asia. In 1644 its armies entered Beijing after the Battle of Shanhai Pass, and over the following years they conquered most of China. Ming loyalists still held out in the far south and on the coast, and the new rulers depended heavily on Han Chinese generals and officials.

The future emperor, Xuanye, was born in Beijing on 4 May 1654, the third son of the Shunzhi Emperor. His mother came from the Tong family, Han Chinese in origin but long enrolled in the Manchu banner system. Xuanye survived smallpox in childhood, a point said to have counted in his favour, since the disease killed many in the imperial family. His father died of smallpox on 5 February 1661, and Xuanye succeeded him at the age of six.

The regency and the seizure of power

Shunzhi’s will appointed four Manchu regents: Sonin, Suksaha, Ebilun and Oboi. Their government reversed some of Shunzhi’s reliance on Chinese officials and eunuchs and favoured Manchu interests. The boy emperor was guided above all by his grandmother, the Grand Empress Dowager Xiaozhuang, a Mongol princess who remained his most trusted adviser until her death in 1688.

After Sonin died in 1667, Kangxi formally began to rule in person, but Oboi had become the dominant figure at court and had his rival Suksaha put to death. In 1669 the fifteen-year-old emperor had Oboi arrested and imprisoned, a dramatic stroke later embellished with stories of young wrestlers seizing the regent in the palace. From then on Kangxi governed himself.

Securing the empire

The greatest early challenge came from the south. Three Han generals who had helped the Qing conquest, led by Wu Sangui in Yunnan, ruled huge provinces almost as independent princes. When Kangxi accepted their offers to retire in 1673, they rose in the Revolt of the Three Feudatories, which for a time threatened all of southern China. The war lasted until 1681 and ended with the destruction of the feudatories.

Kangxi then turned to Taiwan, held by the Zheng family, heirs of the Ming loyalist Koxinga. In 1683 his admiral Shi Lang defeated the Zheng fleet at Penghu, and the island surrendered. Taiwan became a prefecture of Fujian province in 1684, and the same year the court lifted the ban on maritime trade that had been imposed during the fight against the Zheng regime.

In the north, Russian settlers and Cossacks had built forts along the Amur River. After Qing forces besieged the Russian fort of Albazin in 1685 and 1686, the two empires negotiated the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689, China’s first treaty with a European state, using Jesuits as interpreters.

The western frontier brought the longest struggle. Galdan, ruler of the Dzungar Mongols, invaded the Khalkha Mongols in 1688. Qing forces checked him at Ulan Butung in 1690, and in 1691 the Khalkha princes submitted to Kangxi at Dolon Nor. In 1696 the emperor personally led an army across the Gobi, and his forces routed Galdan at Jao Modo. Galdan died in 1697. Late in the reign Qing armies entered Tibet, taking Lhasa in 1720.

Government and the economy

Kangxi was famously hard-working, reading and annotating reports late into the night. He developed a system of secret palace memorials, letters sent directly to the emperor by trusted officials, which gave him information outside regular channels; his son later expanded it.

He presented himself as a model Confucian ruler. In 1670 he issued the Sacred Edict, sixteen short maxims on family duty, frugality and obedience to be read aloud in villages. In 1679 he held a special examination to recruit eminent scholars, many of them reluctant to serve the Qing, and set them to compile the official history of the Ming dynasty.

The late seventeenth century brought recovery after decades of war. Farmland was resettled, the population grew, and in 1712 Kangxi froze the quota of the ding, a per-head labour tax, at its existing level, promising that population growth would not lead to higher taxes. Critics, then and later, noted that lenient government also allowed corruption and a shortfall in the treasury, which his successor set out to correct.

The southern tours

Between 1684 and 1707 Kangxi made six long inspection tours to the south. Travelling along the Grand Canal, he inspected dykes and water works on the Yellow River, whose floods regularly threatened the canal and the farmland of the north China plain. He visited Suzhou, Hangzhou and Nanjing, received local scholars and officials, and toured the commercial cities of the Yangtze delta.

The tours were also political theatre. In 1684 Kangxi visited the temple of Confucius at Qufu and performed the full ritual of prostration. In Nanjing he paid respects at the tomb of the founder of the Ming dynasty. Such gestures helped reconcile the southern Chinese elite, many of whom had resisted the conquest, to Manchu rule. Court artists, led by the landscape painter Wang Hui, recorded the second tour of 1689 in a set of twelve monumental handscrolls.

Scholarship and the Jesuits

Kangxi sponsored great works of compilation, among them the Complete Tang Poems of 1705–1707 and the Kangxi Dictionary, completed in 1716. A vast illustrated encyclopedia begun in his reign was finished under his successor.

His curiosity about Western knowledge was unusual for a Chinese ruler. In the 1660s the Jesuit astronomer Johann Adam Schall von Bell had been condemned after an attack by the official Yang Guangxian. In 1668 and 1669 the young emperor ordered public tests of astronomical predictions, which the Flemish Jesuit Ferdinand Verbiest won. Verbiest took charge of the Astronomical Bureau and later supervised the casting of cannon for the war against the feudatories.

From 1688 a group of French Jesuits sent by Louis XIV joined the court. Kangxi studied geometry from Manchu translations of Euclid and was reportedly cured of malaria in 1693 with quinine they supplied. In 1692 he issued an edict tolerating Christianity, and between 1708 and 1717 Jesuit teams surveyed the empire to produce an atlas of unprecedented accuracy. Jesuit reports, such as Joachim Bouvet’s portrait of the emperor published in Paris in 1697, made Kangxi admired in Europe, including by the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

Relations soured in the Chinese Rites controversy. The papacy ruled that Chinese Christians must not take part in ceremonies honouring Confucius and their ancestors, a decision confirmed by Pope Clement XI in 1715. Kangxi regarded this as interference in Chinese customs; he required missionaries to accept the rites, and by the end of his reign missionary activity was sharply restricted.

The succession crisis and death

Kangxi had more than fifty children, many of whom died young. In 1675 he named his infant son Yinreng crown prince, but as an adult Yinreng was accused of cruelty and plotting. The emperor deposed him in 1708, restored him in 1709 and deposed him again in 1712, leaving the succession open. His sons formed rival factions that troubled his last years.

Kangxi died on 20 December 1722 at his garden palace outside Beijing. His fourth son, Yinzhen, became the Yongzheng Emperor. Rumours that Yinzhen had altered his father’s will circulated for centuries, but historians have found no firm evidence for them. Kangxi was buried at the Jingling tomb in the Eastern Qing Tombs.

Timeline

• 1654, 4 May: Xuanye, the future Kangxi Emperor, is born in Beijing.
• 1661, February: he succeeds the Shunzhi Emperor under four regents.
• 1669: Kangxi has the regent Oboi arrested and takes full control of government.
• 1673–1681: the Revolt of the Three Feudatories is fought and suppressed.
• 1683: Qing forces conquer the Zheng regime on Taiwan.
• 1684: first southern tour; Taiwan becomes a prefecture of Fujian.
• 1689: Treaty of Nerchinsk with Russia.
• 1696: Galdan is defeated at Jao Modo.
• 1712: Yinreng is deposed for the second time; the ding tax quota is frozen.
• 1722, 20 December: Kangxi dies and is succeeded by the Yongzheng Emperor.

Legacy

Kangxi is usually regarded as one of the ablest rulers in Chinese history. He completed the Qing conquest, expanded the empire’s frontiers and won over much of the Han Chinese elite, opening a long period of peace and prosperity that historians call the High Qing, continued under Yongzheng and Qianlong.

His reign also had limits. The interest in Western science stayed largely within the court, and the dispute with Rome curtailed one of the main channels of exchange with Europe. The financial and administrative laxity of his later years left problems for his successor.

Why it matters

The Kangxi Emperor turned a recent conquest into a lasting empire. The borders he secured, from Taiwan to Mongolia, shaped the territory of modern China, and his blend of Manchu power, Confucian rule and openness to foreign learning defined the Qing at its height.